The article “Technologies for Guidance of Radiofrequency Ablation in the Multimodality Interventional Suite of the Future”, Bradford J. Wood et al., Journal of Vascular Interventional Radiology, 2007 Jan., 18: pages 9 to 24 discloses methods for ablation planning for ablating an object of interest like a tumor or metastasis. The methods include calculating a temperature distribution under consideration of an arrangement of an ablation element with respect to the object of interest and with respect to blood vessels having a cooling effect and determining the parts of the object of interest having a temperature being large enough for ablating these parts. If there are parts of the object having temperatures being too small for being ablated, the orientation and/or position of the ablation element can be modified and the calculation of the temperature distribution and the determination of the parts of the object of interest with temperatures being large enough for being ablated can be repeated. This modification, calculation and determination procedure is repeated until an orientation and position of the ablation element has been found which allow ablating the object of interest completely.
For calculating the temperature distribution complicated non-linear differential equations have to be solved, where the nonlinearity arises from the fact that for example, material parameters like the thermal conductivity of tissue change with temperature. This calculation of the temperature distribution requires high computational costs leading to a long period of time needed for ablation planning.